Principal Investigator(s):Lauritsen, Janet, University of Missouri-St. Louis. Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice; Heimer, Karen, University of Iowa. Department of Sociology

Summary:

The purpose of this project was to estimate long-term trends in violent victimization by gender and various socio-demographic factors. These factors included race and ethnicity, age, type of place (urban, suburban, rural), socio-economic status, marital status (for adults), and family status (for juveniles). The principal investigators also further disaggregated these violent victimization trends by victim-offender relationship to reveal trends in violence committed by strangers, intimate partne... (more info)

The purpose of this project was to estimate long-term trends in violent victimization by gender and various socio-demographic factors. These factors included race and ethnicity, age, type of place (urban, suburban, rural), socio-economic status, marital status (for adults), and family status (for juveniles). The principal investigators also further disaggregated these violent victimization trends by victim-offender relationship to reveal trends in violence committed by strangers, intimate partners, and known/non-intimate offenders. The researchers produced these various trends in violent victimization by pooling and appropriately weighting the National Crime Survey and its successor, the National Crime Victimization Survey for the period 1973 to 2005, resulting in 33 years of data. In total, a series of 135 trends in violent victimization were developed.

Universe:
All individuals in the United States ages 12 and older between the years 1973 to 2005.

Data Types:
aggregate data

Data Collection Notes:

The rates in this dataset represent three year moving averages of total violent victimization which includes attempted and completed rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, and simple assaults. The decision to use three year moving averages was made by the principal investigators so that estimates for smaller subgroups would be reliable and the trends would be comparable. Two year averages are used for the endpoints of the time series.

Users should be aware that some of the original data sources have been deaccessioned and are no longer available from ICPSR. ICPSR 4451 has been replaced by ICPSR 22746; ICPSR 4276 has been replaced by ICPSR 22900; ICPSR 3995 has been replaced by ICPSR 22901.

Users should refer to the project's final technical report (Lauritsen and Heimer, 2009; NCJ 229133) for additional information on the study methodology, weighting, and rate estimation procedures.

Methodology

Study Purpose:
The purpose of this project was to estimate long-term trends in violent victimization by gender and various socio-demographic factors. These factors included race and ethnicity, age, type of place (urban, suburban, rural), socio-economic status, marital status (for
adults), and family status (for juveniles). The researchers also further disaggregated these violent victimization trends by victim-offender relationship to reveal trends in
violence committed by strangers, intimate partners, and known/non-intimate offenders.

Study Design:
To estimate the long-term trends in violent crime by gender and other socio-demographic correlates, the researchers used data from the National Crime Survey (NCS) and its successor, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). These rates were estimated using the public-use data files that are available through the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). The victimization rates for each year from 1973 to 2005 were estimated by using information available in the incident and person-level files, resulting in 33 years of data. For many of the NCVS rates, the researchers were able to rely on the concatenated incident-level file to produce the sample weighted incident counts. However, estimation of some of the rates required the use of annual incident-level and person-level files. More specifically,
the researchers used annual incident files for the estimates for the 1970s, and used annual person-level files to create the denominators for all years. Violent victimization rates were defined to include attempted and completed crimes of rape, robbery, aggravated assault and simple assault.

Sample:
The National Crime Survey/National Crime Victimization Survey uses a stratified, multi-stage cluster sampling design developed by the Census Bureau to be representative of persons ages 12 and older living in housing units in the United States.

Time Method:
Time Series

Weight:
Annual estimates from the weighted National Crime Survey (NCS) data and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data were combined to produce trends in violent victimization by gender and various socio-demographic factors for the period 1973 to 2005. Rates based on NCS data were weighted according to crime type to make the NCS trends comparable to the NCVS trends.

Description of Variables:
The study contains 176 total variables including the year, 135 violent victimization rate variables, and 40 population variables. The 135 violent victimization rate variables include victimization rates of females and males across various socio-demographic subgroups and by victim-offender relationship. Specifically, variable groups include gender, race/ethnicity by gender, age by gender, type of place by gender, household poverty status by gender, marital status by gender (adults), and household type by gender (youths).

Response Rates:
Not applicable.

Presence of Common Scales:
None.

Extent of Processing: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of
disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major
statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to
these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: